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The Global Jewish News SourceFri, 09 Dec 2016 15:43:39 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1Op-Ed: Saluting a stand against Holocaust denialhttp://www.jta.org/2010/07/12/news-opinion/opinion/op-ed-saluting-a-stand-against-holocaust-denial
http://www.jta.org/2010/07/12/news-opinion/opinion/op-ed-saluting-a-stand-against-holocaust-denial#respondTue, 13 Jul 2010 02:31:00 +0000http://jta-live.alley.ws/2010/07/12/default/op-ed-saluting-a-stand-against-holocaust-denialThe people and leaders of Weimar, Germany, are to be commended for not looking the other way when an Iranian delegation refused to visit the Buchenwald concentration camp, writes the chairman of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.]]>WASHINGTON (JTA) — An official Iranian delegation from the city of Shiraz recently visited Weimar, its sister city in Germany. Like Weimar, Shiraz has been a capital of high culture for centuries, and appreciating the arts undoubtedly was high on the itinerary of Mayor Mehran E’temadi and his fellow delegates.

The delegation from Shiraz did not, however, see fit to tour the other, less proud side of Weimar’s history — the concentration camp of Buchenwald, located just four miles from the city, where more than 50,000 Jews and others were killed and made to endure cruel and barbaric treatment. The Iranians were scheduled to visit the concentration camp memorial, but they refused to go, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who has heard the anti-Semitic rants and Holocaust calumnies spewed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That the Shiraz delegation on their June visit chose to avoid the discomfort and embarrassment of confronting the truth is not surprising. But what might come as a pleasant surprise is the heartening reaction of their German hosts: The Weimar City Council refused to meet their guests from Shiraz.

The message Weimar sent to E’temadi and his delegation could not have been clearer: If they choose historical revisionism over historic truth and prejudice over tolerance, then they are not welcome in respectable company, no matter what other values or interests they might share.

It is important to recall that Weimar is not just any city with a black stain on its past. Weimar is a 1,000-year-old town renowned for its cultural heritage. It is the city of Goethe and Schiller and Bach and Liszt. The Bauhaus art movement was founded there. And yet the city’s illustrious past does not prevent its current leaders from facing up to a shameful era in its history, a lesson clearly lost on the delegation from Iran’s city of poets.

Had E’temadi and his fellow delegates not avoided Buchenwald, they would have been hard-pressed to let stand their president’s Holocaust denial. As cultured, intelligent people, they could not have misunderstood the purpose of the ovens in the concentration camp’s crematorium. Walking though Buchenwald’s “Little Camp,” where the Jews were confined and the worst conditions existed, they hardly could have sustained the lies of their leader. Coming face to face with the meat hooks on which the Nazis hung prisoners before clubbing them to death, the distinguished guests from Shiraz would have received a sobering insight into what is reality and what is myth.

Indeed, the Iranian delegation would have been shamed into silence had they read the words engraved on the memorial at the Little Camp — words that I wrote when creating the memorial on behalf of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad:

“Conditions were barbaric. Windowless stables with dirt floors intended to house 50 horses at times contained nearly 2,000 people. There was no running water, no sanitation and virtually no heat in the stables. … With only one latrine, many inmates were forced to use their food bowls as night latrines. By 1945, an ever-present stench of human excrement pervaded the site. Corpses lay about in the open as the death toll increased daily. The Little Camp was a place of deepest despair for those left there to be forgotten and to die from cold, starvation, dehydration, debilitating labor, torture and rampant epidemics of diseases that went untreated.”

Even at the cost of disrespecting their German hosts, however, the Iranian delegation elected not to go to Buchenwald, a site visited by 750,000 people each year.

One can only hope that the delegation’s decision was driven by fear of political repercussions back home. The alternative explanation for their actions is far more worrisome: That Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial is finding a receptive audience among the Iranian people. Repeated often enough, vicious lies eventually will be accepted as fact by many.

The people and leaders of Weimar are to be commended for not looking the other way as E’temadi and his fellow Iranians denied the city’s past. Most Germans know all too well the cost of being bystanders when prejudice and hate are not confronted. They understand that when the Holocaust is denied and truth is under assault, so too is freedom, and so too is humanity.

(Warren L. Miller is chairman of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, a federal government agency that works with foreign governments to preserve endangered sites of cultural and historical significance.)

]]>http://www.jta.org/2010/07/12/news-opinion/opinion/op-ed-saluting-a-stand-against-holocaust-denial/feed0Op-Ed: Europeans still need Holocaust lessonshttp://www.jta.org/2009/05/18/news-opinion/opinion/op-ed-europeans-still-need-holocaust-lessons
http://www.jta.org/2009/05/18/news-opinion/opinion/op-ed-europeans-still-need-holocaust-lessons#respondTue, 19 May 2009 02:18:00 +0000http://jta-live.alley.ws/2009/05/18/default/op-ed-europeans-still-need-holocaust-lessonsWASHINGTON (JTA) — A man convicted of Holocaust denial in Germany and France was scheduled to become president of the European Parliament this summer. It is only a ceremonial post, one awarded to the oldest European parliamentarian, but it is an honor nonetheless — and the honor was to go to French racist Jean-Marie Le Pen. His...]]>WASHINGTON (JTA) — A man convicted of Holocaust denial in Germany and France was scheduled to become president of the European Parliament this summer. It is only a ceremonial post, one awarded to the oldest European parliamentarian, but it is an honor nonetheless — and the honor was to go to French racist Jean-Marie Le Pen. His fellow parliamentarians changed the rules last week to deny him the post.

But it says something that a known Holocaust denier, particularly one who continues to publicize his historical lies, was even in a position to become president of the European Parliament. While it reflects badly on his French constituents, it also says that there is still much work to do to sensitize and educate Europeans about the Holocaust and the moral imperative it teaches.

And make no mistake about it, Le Pen is hardly the only well-known person minimizing the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis. A few weeks ago, Archbishop Dadeus Grings, who leads a diocese of nearly 1 million Catholics in Brazil, claimed that “more Catholics than Jews died in the Holocaust, but this isn’t known because the Jews control the world’s media.” Before that, controversial British bishop Richard Williamson said, “There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!” The president of Iran, the leader of Hamas and others proclaim that the Holocaust is a myth or exaggerated.

Why, some might ask, should we care about this right now, given all the very real problems we are facing at home and abroad? The answer is simple: The way in which the Holocaust is remembered is a good indicator of the health of a society. Where the Holocaust is denied and the truth is under assault, freedom and humanity often suffer as well.

For those of us in America and elsewhere in the free world, it may be hard to believe that such blatantly untrue rantings can find a receptive audience except by Jew haters and lunatics. A quick Google search produces a massive amount of irrefutable evidence of the Nazis’ atrocities, but those who spread vile lies about the Holocaust often are not shamed into silence.

Holocaust deniers’ insidious words are dangerous because one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that civilization is fragile and the descent into barbarism can be shockingly quick. Without moral leadership and strong public rejection of intolerance, free people can quickly become slaves, ordinary people executioners.

Since the word genocide was created in 1944, the world has witnessed the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in Cambodia, the Hutus’ slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda and the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. These horrors transpired after the world vowed “Never Again.” It is the memories of all those tragedies that Jean-Marie Le Pen, Dadeus Grings and Richard Williamson also desecrate when they deny the Holocaust.

While words will not kill, verbal assaults on history are dangerous nonetheless, for they give support to those who would act on their evil intentions if given the chance.

One such man is Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has threatened to destroy Israel. He believes, as do many in the Middle East, that if the Holocaust is questioned, so too is Israel’s legitimacy. As stated by Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, at a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran: “If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt.”

When evil men state their intentions to destroy those who stand in their way, we must take them seriously because history has shown — and in Europe, the reminders are everywhere — that evil men will try, and can succeed.

(Warren L. Miller is chairman of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, a federal government agency that works with foreign governments to preserve endangered sites of cultural and historical significance.)